Why women don’t play the power game

One male chief executive laments that his male managers are more willing to speak up in meetings or claim ownership of ideas (including those which turn out to be wrong) or believe themselves ready for promotion.
Illustration: Louie Douvis

I recently complimented a terrific female chief executive on the success of the business under her leadership. She was quick to credit various external factors and luck that had gone her way. I realised I would never get a similar response from a male chief executive. That’s the good news – and the bad news.

Close to 800 people will attend the Chief Executive Women annual dinner in Sydney on Thursday night. Over the years, it has turned into one of the big events of the corporate world’s social calendar.

But that sort of success and acceptance doesn’t stop women questioning – typically, questioning themselves – why a lot more women aren’t represented in the most senior levels of business.

No one these days would concede gender should be a barrier to doing any job. No one would admit to a pro-male bias in choosing people for senior positions. To the contrary, most big companies insist they are determined to increase the number of women in executive management and on boards. Elaborate diversity policies and targets are by now pretty standard.

Despite a slight jump in the number of women appointed to boards, overall numbers still indicate it is not working very well.

Related Quotes

Company Profile

Of ASX 200 companies last year, only 3.5 per cent of the CEOs, 3 per cent of the chairmen and 15.8 per cent of the directors were female.

But the effort to change is official, the debate about the need for improvement real.

So what’s the problem?

Clearly this goes well beyond blaming obvious sexism or old-fashioned attitudes of male-dominated boards or management. A lot of it also has to do with the choices women make too – consciously or unconsciously.

The popularity of
Sheryl Sandberg
’s book Lean Inshows how even extremely powerful women – Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook – still struggle with a lack of confidence in their own abilities. That includes a distinctly appealing reluctance to learn the art of self-promotion – a skill that does seem to come more naturally to men.

The book advises women to “lean in" a lot more rather than constantly pulling back – whether it’s participating in conversations, taking credit for ideas, putting themselves up for jobs or negotiating with their bosses. The subtitle is “Women, Work and the Will to Lead".

My immediate reaction was a perverse mental celebration of the virtues of women preferring to “lean out": of not wanting to be aggressive, over-confident and self-aggrandising, of refusing to play power games, of not wanting their lives to be defined by title and status at work, of choosing different values in balancing children and family life.

And, of course, there’s also the hidden joy of women already doing so much “leaning in" when outside the workforce.

Women sitting around a kitchen table certainly have no difficulty talking confidently and easily and humorously about all sorts of topics. It’s usually the men who tend to “lean out" – or have less to talk about – in social gatherings. (Could it be the women I mix with? Many of them don’t have full-time jobs but they do have very full lives.)

It is still true that many years in the workforce only seem to make the differences between the outcomes for men and women more obvious rather than less. Certainly less logical.

We all know the stats about the number of female graduates now outnumbering male graduates. Yet the relatively equal number of talented men and women starting jobs in companies inevitably means the gender balance at senior levels is totally unequal 10 and 20 years later.

Sometimes, there is a deliberate choice to “pull back" because of children and domestic commitments. For all the talk about equally shared parenting and modern families, most women – happily or otherwise – still take on more of the responsibility for the daily juggle. And more of the internal guilt for inevitably not managing the balance perfectly. Men are usually more easily impressed by themselves and their contribution in hours or effort.

But this psychological pattern is also repeated in attitudes at work. Look at the well-documented failure of individual women to negotiate as hard as men for pay increases – even when doing exactly the same job.

One male chief executive laments that his male managers are more willing to speak up in meetings or claim ownership of ideas (including those which turn out to be wrong) or believe themselves ready for promotion.

“Women worry much more about whether they have the right skills or experience for the job or whether they will make mistakes,’’ he says.

That means competence often gets confused with confidence. Many women become frustrated by a work culture where male colleagues are promoted over them for no rational reason. Bluster wins. Women often leave to set up their own businesses.

But there’s no escaping a social culture that tends to describe male behaviour as strong or successful or confident and similar female behaviour as aggressive or difficult or polarising.

Sandberg cites a US university business school experiment where students were given the case study of a successful entrepreneur.

For half of the students, the entrepreneur’s first name was correct – Heidi. For the other half of the group, the name was changed to Howard. Howard was judged to be a more appealing colleague, Heidi a more selfish one.